East Tennessee History · County by county
A river county that shares its name, minus a letter, with a British fort upstream: a ferry landing that became a county seat, a planter’s mill village that became a railroad-car town, a bridge both armies burned and rebuilt, and a fight over a three-inch fish that went all the way to the Supreme Court before a lake rose over the old river towns.
Loudon County is a river county. It sits astride the Tennessee River southwest of Knoxville, reaches north to the Clinch, and is crossed by the lower Little Tennessee, so water is never far away anywhere in its 229 square miles. [S170][S194] It is one of East Tennessee’s younger counties, created on June 2, 1870, from pieces of Roane, Monroe and Blount. [S170][S182] It takes its name from its county seat, and that name echoes, minus one letter, Fort Loudoun, the British outpost that stood a few miles up the Little Tennessee in the 1750s. [S4][S170] The story here runs from the Overhill Cherokee towns upriver to a ferry landing, a planter’s mill village, a railroad bridge that both armies fought over, a freight-car works that fed most of a town, two TVA dams, and a lake community that has helped the county grow quickly in recent years. [S170][S172][S173][S186][S188][S191][S194]
The county had 54,886 people in the 2020 Census, and the Census Bureau’s estimates put it near 64,000 by 2025. [S194] It has five incorporated places. The city of Loudon (5,991 people in 2020) is the county seat; Lenoir City (10,117) is the largest town; Greenback and Philadelphia are small cities; and the town of Farragut reaches a short way into Loudon from Knox County, where most of it lies. [S117][S195][S196] Tellico Village and Rarity Bay are unincorporated communities that the Census counts as census-designated places; Census places Tellico Village in Loudon only and Rarity Bay in both Loudon and Monroe, while one of Tellico Village’s eight neighborhoods lies across the line in Monroe. [S117][S191]
For centuries before any county lines, the rivers here were Native ground. Mississippian-era towns with platform mounds stood along the Tennessee and its branches, and by the 1700s the Cherokee held this country. [S2][S3] The heart of the Overhill Cherokee towns, including Chota, Tanasi and Great Tellico, lay just upstream along the Little Tennessee, in what is now Monroe County. [S3] Sequoyah, who created the written syllabary for the Cherokee language, was born near there. [S11] (Our chapter 1 tells the longer story, and our Monroe County story on Tanasi, the town that named Tennessee, follows it to the lake.)
In 1756 and 1757, during the Seven Years’ War, the colony of South Carolina built Fort Loudoun on the south bank of the Little Tennessee near the mouth of the Tellico River, to hold the Overhill Cherokees on the British side against the French. [S4] It was named for John Campbell, Earl of Loudoun, then the British commander in North America, who never saw it. [S4][S186] About two hundred soldiers manned a log palisade with barracks, storehouses and a powder magazine, and they depended on trade with Cherokee neighbors for much of their food. [S4] As relations soured, the Cherokee besieged the fort in the spring of 1760. The starving garrison gave up on August 9, 1760; the next day, on the march home, Cherokee warriors attacked the column, killing about thirty men and women and taking most of the rest captive. [S4] TVA describes it as the first British fort west of the Appalachians. [S188] (See chapter 2.) The fort site is in Monroe County today, but its name has followed the river: a TVA dam and lake carry it, and the Loudon County seat shares it with a slightly different spelling. [S4][S186][S170]
White settlement came in stages behind a moving treaty line. Families had settled on the north side of the Tennessee, near where the Loudon bridge now crosses, by 1790, and other settlers took up the north banks of the Tennessee and Little Tennessee before 1800. [S170] The 1798 Treaty of Tellico fixed part of the boundary with the Cherokee in this area: a militia muster ground near present-day Greenback served as one of its survey "calls," and later became a turning point on the Loudon–Monroe county line. [S181] Land south of the rivers stayed Cherokee until an 1819 treaty opened it as the Hiwassee District, and settlers did not move in there until 1819–20. [S170][S3]
South of the Tennessee, the Tunnell family arrived first. The Carmichaels and Blairs followed, a ferry went into service, and the landing became known as Blair’s Ferry. [S170] A formal town plan followed in 1850, and the place was renamed Loudon in 1858. [S170] River trade flourished at the landing until the railroad came. [S170]
Upstream on the Little Tennessee, the legislature created the river town of Morgantown in October 1813 at the mouth of Baker’s Creek. First called Portville, it took its name from Revolutionary War veteran Gideon Morgan Sr. [S170] (Today’s Civil War Trails marker spells it Morganton.) It grew into a shipping and business center for the antebellum valley. [S180] Philadelphia, six miles southwest of Blair’s Ferry, was founded in the fall of 1821 by William Knox and Jacob Pearson. [S170]
The story of Lenoir City begins with a Revolutionary War land grant. General William Lenoir of North Carolina, a veteran of the Battle of Kings Mountain, received 5,000 acres for his service and passed the land to his son, Major William Ballard Lenoir, who brought his family here in 1810. [S170][S171] The younger Lenoir built a plantation known for cattle and hogs and a string of mills along Town Creek, and the settlement became known as Lenoir’s Station. [S170][S171]
The best known of their buildings was a brick cotton mill, run with cotton shipped in from the Deep South, that held about a thousand spindles at its peak. [S171][S184] The state historical marker dates its construction to 1810–21 and calls it one of Tennessee’s earliest examples of industrial architecture; the Tennessee Encyclopedia says the mill was on the site by 1834 and that it was built with the labor of enslaved people. [S184][S171] After Major Lenoir died in 1852, four of his sons ran the family business, which held about 2,700 acres. [S170][S178]
The East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad reached Blair’s Ferry in 1852, and by 1855 a covered wooden bridge carried the line north across the Tennessee toward Knoxville. [S170][S173] The bridge changed the town’s fortunes in two directions. River traffic fell away as freight shifted to the rails, but Loudon now held the only railroad crossing of the Tennessee in East Tennessee, a link in the line between Virginia and Chattanooga. [S170][S173] The railroad also made new places. Lenoir’s Station had a depot, and Greenback, on land once owned by Robert Thompson and J. B. Hall, grew up as a railroad town in farming country. [S177][S170]
That one bridge made the area a target for the whole war. No major battle was fought in what became Loudon County, but armies moved back and forth across it for two years, and both sides fought over the crossing. [S170] Confederate guards kept the bridge safe on November 8, 1861, the night Unionist raiders burned other railroad bridges across East Tennessee. [S173] (See chapter 6.)
In June 1863, ahead of a Union invasion, Col. William P. Sanders rode down from Kentucky with about 1,500 cavalry to wreck the railroad. Finding the Loudon bridge too well defended, his men struck Lenoir’s Station on June 19, capturing artillerymen and burning the depot, the family store and a car of Confederate supplies. [S177][S171] They left the cotton mill standing. Local tradition credits Dr. Benjamin B. Lenoir, a Mason, who is said to have traded secret signs with fellow Masons among the Union officers; the Civil War Trails marker adds that Sanders may also have wanted to spare a source of cloth for local Unionists. [S177][S171] Another marker tells how Henrietta Ramsey Lenoir, the doctor’s wife, slipped money out of the family store hidden in skeins of yarn and buried it under a garden hedge. [S178] Later that year Union troops camped on the plantation and turned the doctor’s office into a headquarters; the family afterward listed about $70,000 in losses, from corn and hay to livestock and cotton. [S178]
When Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s Union army moved into East Tennessee at the end of the summer, retreating Confederates set fire to the Loudon bridge at the start of September. [S173][S174] Federal troops simply took a locomotive, tender and three cars apart, ferried them across on a pontoon bridge and put them back together on the other side. [S173] On October 20, 1863, two Confederate cavalry brigades surprised Col. Frank Wolford’s Union brigade at Philadelphia, the southernmost town Burnside held. Wolford’s men fought until their mountain howitzers ran out of ammunition and then fled to Loudon; the Confederate report claimed 700 prisoners, 50 wagons and six cannon. The Civil War Trails marker calls it the first Union defeat of the occupation. [S179] Eight days later the Federals pulled back across the river and ran their train off the end of the track into the water. [S173][S174]
In mid-November, Gen. James Longstreet led two reinforced Confederate divisions north to retake Knoxville. [S180] Rather than fight his way across at Loudon, he laid a pontoon bridge at Huff’s Ferry, just downstream, on November 13–15, slipping past the Union force guarding the town. [S175] At dusk on November 15 he caught up with Burnside at Lenoir’s Station; Burnside fell back the next morning toward Campbell’s Station, now Farragut. [S176] (Our Knox County history follows the campaign to Fort Sanders.)
The siege ended from the south. Gen. William T. Sherman marched up the railroad from Chattanooga on November 28, through Philadelphia toward Morganton on the Little Tennessee. The ford there was three and a half feet deep and 240 yards wide in near-freezing weather, too much for infantry to wade, so his men tore down empty houses and barns in the town and built a bridge, finished on December 4. That same day Longstreet gave up the siege and withdrew toward upper East Tennessee. [S180] As the Confederates left Loudon in early December they ran their own engines and cars into the river and abandoned the crossing to the Union for good. [S174][S173] The Tennessee Encyclopedia counts three locomotives and forty-eight cars sunk; the Civil War Trails marker says the Confederate rail base there had held four engines and between 75 and 100 cars. [S170][S173]
Union engineers had a temporary bridge carrying trains by April 1864 and a sturdier one by November. A last Confederate attempt, a party of twenty men who floated down the river in February 1865 to destroy it, ended with their capture near Kingston. [S173] One of the Confederate earthworks that guarded the bridge survives on a hill beside the Civil War Trails marker, on what was then the John Blair farm. [S173] (Our Roane County history picks up the river below Kingston.)
Five years after the war, the legislature carved a new county out of Roane, Monroe and Blount. The courthouse marker records that it was first named Christiana before it became Loudon County. [S182][S170] The county court organized on September 5, 1870, and the town square in Loudon was donated for a courthouse. [S170] The court chose a plan by A. C. Bruce, and the brothers J. Wesley and Ira Napoleon Clark (the marker spells it Clarke) built it for $14,200; it was ready in September 1872. [S170][S182] The marker on its lawn notes its place on the National Register of Historic Places, and it has served as the seat of county government ever since. [S182][S170]
On April 23, 2019, a fire burned for hours inside the courthouse and did more than $1 million in damage. Restoration reused the bones of the old building and took six years; the courthouse celebrated its grand reopening in April 2025, and the legislature passed a resolution marking the occasion. [S193]
Recovery after the war came slowly. The Lenoirs rebuilt their depot and store and put up a new flour mill to replace one that had burned in 1860. [S170] In 1890 a group of investors from Knoxville, New York City and Lima, Ohio, formed the Lenoir City Company to buy the remaining Lenoir lands and build a town; its small Victorian office on Depot Street, designed by the Knoxville firm Baumann and Baumann, still stands. [S185][S170] Lenoir City was incorporated in 1907. [S170][S185] The old cotton mill housed a hosiery mill run by the Holston Manufacturing Company in the 1890s, then ground flour into the 1950s. [S171]
The town’s great employer was the Lenoir Car Works, a freight-car building and repair plant on ninety-three acres along the river. Founded in 1904 and bought by the Southern Railway the next year, it absorbed the Bass foundry that cast iron wheels for railcars, and by 1907 it turned out ten to twelve cars a day with about 500 workers. [S172] During World War I its payroll reached 2,700 men, and most families in town depended on it. [S172] A bitter strike in the early 1920s left one striker dead and drew in the local Ku Klux Klan, which threatened and burned crosses at the homes of men who crossed the line. [S172] After wooden freight cars were ruled unsafe in the mid-1920s, the plant leaned on its foundries; the iron foundry closed in 1957 and the steel foundry in 1963. [S172]
Loudon’s own industries came later and stayed closer to the farm economy. Charles H. Bacon opened a hosiery mill there in 1906, followed by a mantel company and the Don P. Smith chair factory. [S170] In Philadelphia, Edward Waller’s Philadelphia Hosiery Mill, founded in 1921, grew for four decades, was sold in the early 1960s to become Bar Knit Hosiery, and closed in the early 1970s. [S170]
In 1923 Black families in Loudon, the Julius Rosenwald Fund and public money together built the Dunbar Rosenwald School for $5,700. By 1930 it was the only Rosenwald school in the county, serving about 258 school-age children, and it was a gathering place for the whole community. It closed in 1965 as Loudon’s schools desegregated; a Masonic lodge bought the building the next year and kept it open as the Dunbar Community Center. [S183]
The Tennessee Valley Authority, created in 1933, reached Loudon County in 1940. [S21][S186] Fort Loudoun Dam, built between 1940 and 1943 at Lenoir City, stands 122 feet high and 4,190 feet across the Tennessee. Its lock lifts boats about seventy feet, and its lake is the top of the chain of nine TVA reservoirs that make the river navigable all the way to Paducah, Kentucky, 652 miles downstream. [S186] (See chapter 9.)
The second dam took much longer and cost more than money. TVA had studied a dam near the mouth of the Little Tennessee as early as 1936, and it began building Tellico Dam in March 1967, promising thousands of new jobs from industry along a new lake. [S188] The project drew protest from the start. [S188] In 1968 TVA tore down the last eighteen houses, a store and a church in Morganton; the town’s cemetery is all that remains above water. [S180]
In 1973 a University of Tennessee ichthyologist, David Etnier, found a small, previously unknown fish in the Little Tennessee, the snail darter, whose only known spawning ground was the river the dam would flood. [S190] With the brand-new Endangered Species Act behind them, a UT law student, Hiram (Hank) Hill, sued along with a law professor and an assistant dean of the UT law school. [S190] In 1977, with the dam about 90 percent built, a federal appeals court stopped the project. [S188] On June 15, 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed 6–3 in TVA v. Hill, holding that the law protected the fish even though Congress had kept paying for the dam. [S189]
Congress then created a cabinet-level committee, soon nicknamed the "God Committee," that could exempt projects from the law, but in January 1979 it refused to exempt Tellico. [S188] Tennessee Senator Howard Baker then attached a rider to a public works spending bill exempting the dam, and President Jimmy Carter signed it. [S188][S190] The gates closed on November 29, 1979. [S188] Tellico Lake covered the sites of Chota and Tanasi and other Cherokee towns, along with farms and the old Morganton town site. [S188][S3][S170]
TVA now tells the story under a blunt title: "It’s Complicated." [S188] The agency’s own account says the lake wiped out more than twenty native fish and mussel species from the lower Little Tennessee, required 22,000 acres of land taken through eminent domain, and never produced the factory jobs it promised. [S188] The controversy pushed TVA to start a natural heritage program in 1978 and a cultural resources department in 1979. [S188] The snail darter, meanwhile, survived after biologists moved it to other rivers and found other populations; it was downgraded to threatened in 1984 and taken off the endangered species list on October 4, 2022. [S188] Tellico Dam has no generators. A short canal sends its water to Fort Loudoun Dam’s turbines and lets barges reach the Little Tennessee without a lock. [S187][S188]
TVA’s plans for Tellico included homes and recreation on the shoreline it had bought. The 4,800-acre Tellico Village, built from the 1980s onward by Cooper Communities, sold its first home site in 1987. [S188][S191] Its developer gave the neighborhoods and streets Cherokee names, among them Chota, Tanasi, Toqua and Tommotley, the names of Overhill towns, several of them now under the lake. [S191][S3] Seven of its eight neighborhoods are in Loudon County, and the community says more than 11,000 people now live there year-round. [S191] The county as a whole has grown fast, by about 16 percent between 2020 and 2025, and nearly a third of its residents are 65 or older. [S194]
The fort that gave the county its name lives on in a reconstruction. Fort Loudoun State Historic Park, called a state historic area in older sources, covers 853 acres on the shore of Tellico Lake just across the line at Vonore in Monroe County. It has a reconstructed palisade and barracks, a visitor center and museum, hiking trails, and reenactors who recreate garrison life. [S192][S4] The reconstruction shows the fort as it stood in 1759–60, the year before the siege. [S4] The original foundations of the Tellico Blockhouse are nearby, and the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum is a short drive away. [S192][S11][S191]
Back in Loudon County, the past is close to the surface: the 1872 courthouse is back in use, the burned-out walls of the Lenoir cotton mill and the Lenoir City Company office stand near the railroad in Lenoir City, and markers around the county trace the fight for the Loudon bridge. [S193][S171][S185][S173] For towns, parks and news, see our Loudon County guide.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| c. A.D. 900–1600 | Mississippian mound towns along the Tennessee Valley rivers [S2] |
| 1700s | Overhill Cherokee towns along the Little Tennessee, upstream in today’s Monroe County [S3] |
| 1756–57 | Fort Loudoun built near the mouth of the Tellico River [S4] |
| 1760 | Cherokee siege; garrison surrenders Aug. 9 [S4] |
| 1790 | First white families on the north bank near today’s Loudon bridge [S170] |
| 1798 | Treaty of Tellico boundary runs past Militia Springs [S181] |
| 1810 | Maj. William B. Lenoir settles on his father’s 5,000-acre grant [S170][S171] |
| 1810s–1830s | Lenoir cotton mill built on Town Creek [S184][S171] |
| 1813 | Legislature creates Morgantown (Morganton) on the Little Tennessee [S170][S180] |
| 1819–20 | Hiwassee District south of the rivers opens to settlement [S170][S3] |
| 1821 | Philadelphia founded [S170] |
| 1850–58 | Blair’s Ferry laid out as a town, then renamed Loudon [S170] |
| 1852–55 | East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad arrives; bridge built over the Tennessee [S170][S173] |
| 1863 | Sanders’ raid on Lenoir’s Station, June 19; Philadelphia, Oct. 20; Longstreet crosses at Huff’s Ferry, Nov. 13–15; Lenoir’s Station, Nov. 15; Sherman’s Morganton bridge, Dec. 4 [S177][S179][S175][S176][S180] |
| 1864 | Union engineers rebuild the Loudon railroad bridge [S173] |
| 1870 | Loudon County created, June 2; court organized Sept. 5 [S170] |
| 1872 | Courthouse ready for use [S170] |
| 1890 | Lenoir City Company formed [S185][S170] |
| 1904–05 | Lenoir Car Works founded, then bought by the Southern Railway [S172] |
| 1907 | Lenoir City incorporated [S170] |
| 1921 | Philadelphia Hosiery Mill opens [S170] |
| 1923 | Dunbar Rosenwald School built in Loudon [S183] |
| 1940–43 | TVA builds Fort Loudoun Dam [S186] |
| 1967 | Tellico Dam construction begins [S188] |
| 1968 | TVA clears the last buildings of Morganton [S180] |
| 1973 | Snail darter discovered in the Little Tennessee [S190] |
| 1978 | Supreme Court decides TVA v. Hill, June 15 [S189] |
| 1979 | Congress exempts Tellico; gates close Nov. 29 [S188] |
| 1987 | First home site sold at Tellico Village [S191] |
| 1991 | Arson fire guts the Lenoir cotton mill [S171] |
| 2019 | Fire damages the Loudon County Courthouse, April 23 [S193] |
| 2020 | Census counts 54,886 people in Loudon County [S194] |
| 2022 | Snail darter removed from the endangered list, Oct. 4 [S188] |
| 2025 | Restored courthouse reopens [S193] |
Start in Lenoir City, where the Lenoir City Museum fills the 1890 Lenoir City Company office at 110 Depot Street. It is open April through October, Thursday and Friday 1–4 p.m. and Saturday 10 a.m.–2 p.m. [S185] Within a short walk along Broadway are the ruins of the Lenoir cotton mill and markers for Sanders’ raid, the Lenoir plantation and the November 1863 fight at Lenoir’s Station. [S184][S177][S178][S176] Drive down to Fort Loudoun Dam on City Park Drive to see the lock and the lake. [S186] Then follow U.S. 11 to Loudon: the restored courthouse has markers on its lawn, including Longstreet’s Huff’s Ferry crossing, and the Dunbar Rosenwald School marker is a few blocks away on Steekee Road. [S182][S175][S183] East of town, the Loudon Railroad Bridge Civil War Trails marker at 250 Jamie Drive, in the Sugar Limb Industrial Park, stands below one of the old Confederate earthworks. [S173] In the afternoon, head south to Philadelphia for the Civil War Trails marker at 408 Church Street, then cross to the Little Tennessee side for the Morganton cemetery and marker. [S179][S180] End the day across the Monroe County line at Fort Loudoun State Historic Park in Vonore, open daily (visitor center 8 a.m.–4:30 p.m.). [S192] Hours vary by season everywhere, so check before you go. Our Blount County history continues upriver toward the mountains.
Visit: Lenoir City Museum · Lenoir Cotton Mill ruins, Lenoir City · Fort Loudoun Dam · Loudon County Courthouse, Loudon · Loudon Railroad Bridge marker and earthworks · Battle of Philadelphia marker · Morganton Cemetery and marker · Fort Loudoun State Historic Park, Vonore (Monroe County) · Sequoyah Birthplace Museum, Vonore
Every bracketed number on this page links here. Written by My East TN in our own words and checked against each source on 2026-10-28 (ET). Where sources disagree (for example, whether the Lenoir cotton mill went up between 1810 and 1821 or was first documented in the 1830s, whether Confederates fired the Loudon bridge on September 1 or 2, 1863, how many locomotives and cars ended up in the river, whether the old river town was Morgantown or Morganton, and whether the courthouse reopened in April or May 2025), we give both or leave the exact figure out. The sources we checked do not record who chose the name Loudon in 1858. We don’t republish encyclopedia or museum text — follow the links for the full articles.
Images: My East TN photos and Studio illustrations only. Corrections: [email protected].